Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”/Let us go and make our visit.

Tag Archives: Holidays According to Charles Ives

Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day is the last of the four pieces included in Charles Ives’s A Symphony: New England Holidays. Ives provided no program note for the piece, but the score does bear a dedication to his brother-in-law, Edward Carrington Twichell (“Uncle Deac”):Continue reading →

The first part of this piece is but to give the picture of the dismal, bleak, cold weather of a February night near New Fairfield [Connecticut] . . . . The middle part and the shorter last part are but kinds of refrains made up of some of the old barn-dance tunes and songs of the day . . . . As I remember some of these dances as a boy, and also from father’s description . . . there was more variety of tempo than in the present-day dances. In some parts of the hall a group would be dancing a polka, while in another a waltz, with perhaps a quadrille or lancers going on in the middle. . . . Sometimes the change in tempo and mixed rhythms would be caused by a fiddler who, after playing three or four hours steadily, was getting a little sleepy–or by another player who had been seated too near the hard cider barrel. [John Kirkpatrick, ed., Charles E. Ives Memos 96-97] Continue reading →

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